Having finished Killer Crocodile (1989), it shows just enough contempt for the audience to find charming. Some clear gaffes that were not reshot, crocodile props that while fairly decent got far too much screen-time when the beast presents itself, as atmosphere was not on the director's list of priorities. It sometimes looked stupid, and other times quite impressive, with some good set pieces. The direction and editing is slack but serviceable. The story is adequate, with some silly leaps of logic, but also going beyond the call of duty for piece-of-shit film making at times (when a character disappears, the protagonists persist in trying to find her rather than giving up). The sequel was apparently shot in parallel, so will not be an improvement, and at worst may just be the same plot line with different scenes. The bluray looks good for something of its era, the night scenes (which appear to have actually been shot at night) have enough detail to get by, and unlike a lot of remasters doesn't have nuclear contrast adjustment. If Jaws shot in the style of an Italian cannibal movie appeals to you, this is exactly that. The ending is also a highlight, I don't think it would be a spoiler to say it elects for a Jaws-style spectacular mangling of the beast, with enough silliness to make it memorable.
The director Fabrizio De Angelis had some big successes as a producer (The Beyond(!), New York Ripper, The New Barbarians, Zombi 2, 1990: The Bronx Warriors), but everything he has directed himself appears to be irrelevant.
Notable moment - a torturously-slow crocodile surf-n-stab:
Plus now everything looks like the Null dog to me:
Some psychopathic impulse made me want to watch the second too (1990). This time Angelis goes back to production, and the new director is Giannetto De Rossi, another production guy who has zero notable directoral roles. It begins with footage of the final kill at the end of the last film, so far so normal, but then launches into an almost identical credits roll over the same 'surprise' freeze-frame at the end of the last film (a reveal that the crocodile left a hatching egg), so this film begins with a credits where the last one had it at the end, purely because the director for whatever reason had an immovable fixation that the credits
absolutely must roll over a still of a crocodile egg each time. Maybe he thought this was a really deep motif or something. it wasn't even duplicated, as the scoll roll was different, but the names and still shot were the same.
It reuses a couple of scenes from the original (the swimming croc, a villager attack, the final kill scene twice) but not enough to be egregious. Instead of being eco-warriors in the swamp, we're in a developed industrial town of some type, and canonically this is both in the same universe, and a sequel to the first, with reference to the toxic waste from the first film being cleaned up. It has an appealing swamp/city dynamic, with several intersecting plot-lines opposed to the original's one and a half (the Crocodile Dundee guy was barely a character). The overall sense of the narrative is a lot less rooted in the cannibal genre or the minimal storytelling of Jaws, and more similar to Italian action trifles, or something Andy Sidaris would approve, with a sexy female investigative journalist seeking out the truth of what happened to the toxic waste.
Intriguingly, it does *not* appear to be a shot side-by-side el-cheapo, but actually reusing some of the props and locations, but with a lot more embellishment including a sliding (model?) hut on rails as the crocodile trashes a swamp shack to the misfortune of its sleazy inhabitants. This is what I meant with the previous film when saying it showed little too much of the crocodile, in true exploitation spirit, making the decent prop look simultaneously impressively visceral in its physical presence, but also and terrible and dumb at the same time:
We're now introduced to something that should not be surprising, given the dual nature of the shoot, but was interesting to leave until half-way through: another narrative arc involves a protag from the previous film - the one who defeated the croc, looking very manly and questing around on his motorboat, and meeting discount Crocodile Dundee again too. I'm glad to see him again, he has a bit of a Van Cleef look about him. Perhaps unsurprisingly the crocodile prop (in both films) looks much better when making simplistic lunges to bite people than it does thrashing around in water and menacing people. The direction and practical effects are especially deficient in giving it any sense of being able to swim and dominate the water, with the best set-pieces always being with it bursting out onto land. This leads to some difficulties during a scene where a guy is wrestling the croc, during which he is slammed into the water, but due to budget constraints is done so in the form of an action figure (hard to get a good frame of this - it can also be seen at 2:06 of the trailer):
This time his mouth is blown up instead of diced with a boat's propellor, but somehow the angle chosen for both scenes makes both events look much the same, and in the most surprising twist of the entire film, the credits roll at the end as well as the start, I suspect this may have in part been to pad the duration, which is a little shorter than the first. This sequel is fairly good, and depending on what you're looking for may be more entertaining than the very leaden beat-for-beat Jaws emulation of the original. Both are perfectly adequate, however, and surprisingly neither duplicate the other too much. The first has your usual ensemble of bumbling Scooby Doo-style young people, the second has a more diffuse group of separate parties, none of whom lean too heavily into teen tropes.